Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0
In article <[🔎] 199901270137.RAA14733@cesium.transmeta.com> you write:
>> Most Mail User Agents for standard Unix systems look in /var/mail/<user>
>> for the user's mailbox. So if qmail is switching to ~/Mailbox, then
>> they have to solve the problem for all of the various MUA's out there,
>> and that is really qmail's and mutt's problem. I assume someone in that
>> community must have thought about the problem, since people generally
>> don't react well when they're told that they can't use their favorite
>> mail reader because some new mail system has decided to use a different
>> mailbox convention.
>>
>> So maybe any standard should not say something about the mail spool dir?
>
>Actually, it might be worthwhile to specify that if environment
>variable MAILBOX exists, then MUAs need to honour it?
What MUAs *can't* use ~/Mailbox? The only problem I have with my
computer is that each MUA (eg pine and nmh) requires seperate
configuration, and doesn't look at the $MAIL environment variable. elm
supports it though, mutt might, but I haven't tried it.
Where does the $MAILBOX environment variable come into it? elm uses
$MAIL. eg I have $MAIL=$HOME/Mailbox
I don't administer large Unix systems, but I like the idea of keeping
users private mail in their home directories - IMHO it makes is easier to
manage when a users files are all in one location and not segragated
around the entire disk structure.
Also, I suspect that some people might be confusing ~/Mailbox and
~/Maildir issues. These are two completely different issues. Maildir
comes from Qmail, but my guess is that ~/Mailbox didn't. Qmail has a
program that will automatically convert ~/Maildir to ~/Mailbox (this is
what I use). The only problem I have experienced with Maildir is that it
is not possible to convert Mailbox-->Maildir and programs like login and
sshd which check for new mail on login do not work --- however this is
deviating from the current topic.
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